Roma Gallery presents 11 large-scale wall-mounted artworks by the great American artist Dennis Oppenheim, from 5 May to 4 June 2022, in an exhibition curated by Dimitris Trikas. A towering figure in American conceptual art and beyond, Oppenheim takes innocent signifiers of everyday life and twists them into meanings of death, sickness, horror – or simply agonising doubt. The dialectic relationship between form and content triggers a new conversation, charges with new meaning the signifier-signified relationship. In the unsettling Virus (1989), for instance, small cast plaster figures of Mickey Mouse mounted on aluminium rods, suggest – rather than alluding to the popular amusement park or evoking a happy tune from The Sound of Music – the structural model of the molecules of a threatening virus. How prophetic, indeed! In Thought… he evokes a landscape of danger (war?) by constructing a cluster of bones (Ezekiel’s “dry bones”?) that end in double-edged blades, resembling “fingers of fear” that threaten thought, therefore life itself. Study for Second Generation features the ghost of a car lunging from the striped belly of a zebra. The terms “second generation” and “third generation” relate to the reading of objects and animals as beings transmitted from elsewhere, a suggestion of unreality reinforced by an Alice-in-Wonderland scale that makes household items exaggeratedly too big and larger objects too small. Scale is reversed even as meaning is reversed. The world turns unfamiliar, upended; instead of pleasure, playing produces discomfort, a sense of threat. The forms themselves are readily identifiable, but their abstracted surfaces render them generic and somewhat totemic.

“Champs”(2011)

“Champs”(2011)